New Liskeard is a wide open field for workers.  In the words of Jesus, “The harvest is ripe and the reapers are few.” Jesus also said “Go into all the world and teach the gospel.” I believe on the day of judgment we will have to give an answer why we did not try to teach others the Gospel of Christ. There are many areas within our reach where the truth has not yet been taught. Other groups sow and reap for their master – Satan.

            Thus concludes the journal my grandfather, John Browning, kept of the mission trip we took to New Liskeard, Ontario, during the summer of 1985. My grandfather was in his element, and in his glory that summer, for he enjoyed nothing better (not even golf) than knocking doors. He was good at it, too. Wholly without guile, gregarious, kindly, with a beaming smile – people would open the door and talk to him as long as he wanted to stay. Before we went to Canada, I always thought he was so good at door knocking because he did it in the small town he had lived in all his life. He was never separated from the person behind the door by more than two or three degrees of contact. But he was no less successful a thousand miles due north, closer to the Hudson Bay than to home.

            I was the leader of the trip. At 23, and as a newly minted “Associate Minister,” I was always looking for things to do to keep me from being pigeonholed a “youth minister.” When members of our congregation brought us the invitation to help a church planting in a little town 8 hours due north of Toronto I jumped at the chance to put a team together and plan a mission trip. Teresa and I; Kermit Stephens, one of our elders; my grandfather, the Dennisons (who brought us the invitation), Kevin Large, one of our young adults, and Matt Pittman from the youth group loaded up the church van and headed to the great, white North.

            I was the door-knocking partner of my grandpa for a few days of our trip. I had been his door knocking partner countless times before. I found out on this trip that his gift wasn’t limited to a couple of towns in Wane County, West Virginia. We had the door slammed in our faces only once – by a retired GM Executive who couldn’t get my granddad to give the new congregation a denominational affiliation. Otherwise the old charm worked as well in Ontario, as it did in Appalachia.

            We had a great trip (despite the fact that I got food poisoning on the last day and nearly died of dehydration on the way home). We knocked 1238 doors and had 24 positive responses. If my records are correct, over the next year there were 3 baptisms of contacts we made. 

My grandfather’s journal is the only real record we have of the day-to-day details of the trip. I reread it often, and can hear his voice in my ears, full of excitement at our evangelistic success. “This is a wonderful campaign. I will never forget it,” he wrote at the beginning of our last day. I am proud I was the one who planned the trip, and got him on a foreign field before he died. I would feel better, though, if I were one tenth the evangelist he was.

I used to believe he was so good because it was his gift. Peter and Paul both remind us that we have different gifts (Romans 12, I Corinthians 12, I Peter 4). But the call to evangelize is not limited to a gifted few – it is all encompassing (Matthew 28.18-20). The things I notice, time after time, when reading my grandfather’s mission trip journal are urgency, responsibility, and joy. He had the mindset of a spiritual first-responder – he was urgent about the lost. He believed the call to evangelize was personal – that he would give an account before God. He was so glad that God loved him, and was glad to share the good news about that love with others.

Maybe those three characteristics are the elements of the gift. If so we should all be gifted evangelists.